Blue color

Universal Display reported its financial results for Q1 2019, with revenues of $87.8 million, an operating profit of $34.3 million and a net income of $31.5 million. UDC sees solid momentum in the OLED industry and it is raising its 2019 revenue guidance - to be in the range of $345 million to $365 million. UDC ended the quarter with $527 million in cash and equivalents.

Regarding its blue emissive system development, UDC says that it continues to make "excellent progress" in its ongoing development work. UDC still cannot predict when its blue OLED will be commercially available.

In 2010 Universal Display announced a new AMOLED display architecture called RGB1B2 that uses two blue sub-pixels - a fluorescent deep-blue and a phosphorescent light blue. The introduction of a light blue sub-pixel can significantly extend the operational lifetime of an OLED display and reduce the display's power consumption by as much as 33%.

The RGB1B2 was never adopted (one of the reasons is that adding another sub pixel complicates the TFT backplane and has other disadvantages - but the architecture is now again on the table and UDC presented it again at OLED Korea 2019.

Professor Homas Teets from the University of Houston has been awarded a $589,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to explore new synthetic strategies for producing photoactive organometallic compounds.

Specifically, Teets will use the award in three research areas - efficient and long-lasting blue OLEd emitters, near-infrared (NIR) emitting compounds and photocatalysts for organic synthesis capable of light-induced electron transfer. The grant will also fund educational projects aimed at children from kindergarten through high school.

At the OLED Korea conference, both Merck and Sumitomo detailed their latest OLED inkjet material performance.

Sumitomo is advancing with its R&D efforts, and the company says that its PLED materials will be adopted in mass production systems by 2020 (although JOLED already uses PLEDs in its displays).